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I would like to have a piece of that for wholly non-hype reasons. The space business is limited but the bussiness potential for Starlink, an integral part of th
by cornholio 9y ago
I would like to have a piece of that for wholly non-hype reasons. The space business is limited but the bussiness potential for Starlink, an integral part of the company, is simply monstrous.
If it pans out, Starlink can disrupt a massive, $1 trillion/ year telecom market that is itself booming. Depending on how well they can productize long-term (miniature receivers embedded in laptops, tablets etc.) they stand to capture whole percentage points or even tenths of that market, giving Starlink itself a valuation in the trillions.
It's also an ultra-high moat business, a truly global monopoly. Once you have 12.000 sats in the sky amortized and own the only launch service capable of servicing them, you are impossible to budge.
- joshmarlow 9y ago> Depending on how well they can productize long-term (miniature receivers embedded in laptops, tablets etc.) Does SpaceX even have to do that? Can't they just open source all the designs and let anyone with an account use their network? Leave the construction, sale and support for receivers up 3rd parties.
- shanghaiaway 9y agoWhy do you think they would do this?
- bluGill 9y agoBecause they need the manufactures to put the radio in everything. If the radio is cheap enough everybody will have it by default so it is a no brainer for a large number of people to subscribe and use it. If the it isn't installed by default everywhere that shuts out a lot of potential market.
- jrowley 9y agoOn the other hand, if SpaceX's product is vastly superior, they could capture market share considerably, then at a later time open source to get the rest.
- joshmarlow 9y agoIf their business model is built around revenue from the network service itself, the more customers/devices connected the better - by opening up specs and patents, it opens up other companies to build those devices. Better to sell gasoline than to build gasoline engines :)
- enraged_camel 9y agoCorrect me if I’m wrong but if SpaceX ends up in such a monopoly position there wouldn’t be much stopping another company from launching their own global satellite internet service. Even though SpaceX owns the delivery mechanism they couldn’t legally deny other companies wanting to use it at a fair price. If they do they would be sued immediately.
- DavidSJ 9y agoI think if other companies want to launch thousands of satellites on SpaceX rockets, then SpaceX shareholders would be okay with that too.
- nickik 9y agoThere are already other companies doing the same thing, mostly OneWeb. SpaceX absolutely could deny selling rockets to anybody as rocket launch is not a monopoly. OneWeb has contracts with ISS, Arianespace, RocketLab, BlueOrigin and so on. Non with SpaceX. I don't know if that is because SpaceX denied them, or if they just don't want to work with them.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> I don't know if that is because SpaceX denied them, or if they just don't want to work with them. Probably didn't ever ask, since they're a direct competitor. I can imagine how this conversation would go: OneWeb: oh, by the way, can we buy launches on your rockets for our satellite Internet thing? <Both sides laughing> SpaceX: no.
- greglindahl 9y agoActually Oneweb and SpaceX did talk about working together a while ago, and you can see what happened: SpaceX ended up deciding to start a competing project.
- Tuna-Fish 9y ago> (miniature receivers embedded in laptops, tablets etc.) Not possible because of physics. Unless they branch into a completely different portion of the spectrum with all-new satellites and some communications tech that is as of yet unknown, they really cannot miniaturize the receivers.
- cornholio 9y agoThere is no fundamental physical reason that a phased array antenna for the V-Band (wavelengths of 4 to 7 mm) cannot be fitted into a 14" laptop package or 10" tablet. They are in the final phases of FCC approval for such a constellation of 7500 sats, in addition to the already approved ~4400 Ka/Ku bands constellation. There might be technical showstoppers today related to transmitter power and battery, beamforming effectiveness and indoor performance of a mobile device, signal processing difficulties etc., ergo "long term productization".
- xhrpost 9y agoEven if individual device reception isn't possible, just using these for better backhaul access like for an office building or neighborhood would still be massively disruptive.
- cornholio 9y agoLet's not forget the middle ground, a "pizza box" that sits on the roof and provides 1Gbps wifi connectivity to a home is something that rents for $50 a month to hundreds of millions of customers, while the $15 version - to a billion customers.
- schraeds 9y ago7500 satellites can serve a billion users?
- stcredzero 9y agoLet's not forget the middle ground, a "pizza box" that sits on the roof Aww, hell! Make it a small pizza box sized device I can put on a bracket I can hang out the window! Include a wireless hotspot and you'd sell those things like crazy!
- Symmetry 9y agoYou'll need a pizza box sized dish to receive from Starlink. We'd have to wait for a hypothetical Starlink II or such before receivers in laptops become practical.
- CodeCube 9y agoCan't get to Starlink II, without Starlink I ;) I'm excited about the possibilities, and really hope they can, as you suggest, continue to iterate and improve.
- aylmao 9y agoThis assumes a lot of technical aspects. I'd like to learn more about the actual capabilities of the network before making assumptions like this.